THE BUG COLLECTOR

Omar was camped-out on Michael’s backdoor stoop with the local newspaper when his friend rounded the corner. He grinned to see the wrinkled clothes, and with some special radar. “Looks like someone got lucky last night.”

The resident rolled his eyes on unlocking the backdoor. “Hardly.”

“This is a jumping place,” Omar declared, holding up the banner headline on the newspaper:

HOMECOMING, HALLOWEEN, AND METEOR SHOWER CONVERGE ON TOWN.

“Meteor shower?” Michael complained. “How did I miss that part?”

“It’s suppose to be overcast,” the lawyer explained. “Not quite the perfect storm.”

The broad-swath-of-a-man followed his friend inside, not noticing the state of disarray in the house from the previous day’s upheaval. He sat down in a chair at the kitchen table while Michael, rattling off his laundry list of latest horrors, brushed his teeth at the sink.

The lawyer’s expression throughout the recitation was low-key, although on hearing the part about the pills possibly being tampered with, he ventured a half-solution. “Throw them away. I can always get you new pills.”

The painter was surprised by the paltry nature of the advice. “But you said this was all part of a TV show? Right?”

“I’m still working on it.”

“Still working on it? What have you been working on?”

The friend stood up in a bit of redirection. “I hope we’re safe to drink coffee in this town.”

“Why aren’t you telling me what you know, Ommie?”

Omar had that look on his face. A look that told his friend he was on a need-to-know basis.

Michael let him wriggle off the hook. “Well, if nothing else, I can introduce you to Emma while you’re here.”

The friend chafed. “I’m never anxious to meet any woman who will be your undoing.”

Michael frowned.

Omar justified himself. “I don’t blame women for that, mind you. Domesticity makes women Nature’s natural ally in dragging the species down into mediocrity. Women save the race from the terminal fate of either being too cerebral or too dangerous to survive.”

“You will be nice to her?”

The lawyer was about to balk.

“Promise?”

Omar looked at the door. “Let’s go meet this wretched woman.”

The resident charged upstairs for a quick change of clothes, gladdened by the prospect of spending the day with his friend.

Despite their differences in temperament, both Omar and Michael were artful gleaners who had assembled their philosophies from disparate parts. Their instinct and swagger as outsiders made them ill suited for academia, ill groomed for culture, but praiseworthy of each other. Their loyalty to one another was unshakably steadfast, and when the lawyer invariably moved away it left a void in the painter’s life. Their relationship had always been agreeably asymmetrical: Omar was the Sun and Michael was the lesser planet. While the Philosopher King was in his heaven, all was right in the world. Both men were obstinately idealistic, and compelled to act on principles that frequently handicapped them. This compunction to truth made them indifferent to de rigueur mores, which marked them as poor diplomats with others, and even poorer advocates for themselves. They did not glad-hand or suffer fools kindly, and it was as much out of shared alienation as out of a shared mountaintop that Michael clung to Omar as his beacon.

The car ride to the coffee shop was eventful. The lawyer picked up Michael’s journal from the dashboard and thumbed through some of his old letters. He was about to replace it when he spotted a scrap of paper. “What’s this?”

“That’s Amber’s phone number. Your prostitute friend.”

“Who are you talking about?”

Michael tried again. “Amber Monet. The call girl you sent to my room the other night when I came to see you.”

Omar laughed. “Why in Christ’s Heaven would I send a hooker to your room? Every time I’ve tried to set you up with girls you’ve chickened out!”

The friend scrambled to make sense of it. “But she was in your apartment. You said you sent her to help me fall asleep.”

“That was the building maid I told you about. I sent her by your room with a sleeping pill. You flipped out, remember?”

Michael tumbled. “But you mentioned my problem in front of her. You had to have…”

Omar interrupted, “The ‘problem’ I was referring to was your sleepwalking.”

“But some woman in a maid outfit came by my room and talked to me. We even talked about you!”

“Did you have sex with her?”

“She implied we had.”

“Then you dreamt it. You can’t even get laid in your dreams.”

The painter was chalk.

“And she said her name was Amber Monet?”

“Yes.”

“Like the porno actress?”

“What porno actress?”

“Amber Monet was a big porn star in LA back in the Seventies.” Omar shook his head. “Now I know you were having a wet dream. Probably from the dirty movie in your hotel room.”

Michael protested. “I’ve never seen a pornographic film in my entire life!”

“But my maid friend told me you had a copy of Invasion of the Bodily Snatch in your room.”

“So?”

“That’s an Amber Monet film. Sort of a Bride of Frankenstein flick about a dead woman who’s brought back to life by a college professor.”

The artist rose up at the steering wheel. “That sounds like Daedalus Monet! That sounds like my research on him over at the library!”

The lawyer spun it. “Daedalus Monet, Amber Monet—it’s only more evidence you’re being dicked with by these TV people, Mike. You and your wee willie are going to be a mid-season replacement for some crappy sitcom on Fox.”

Michael quibbled. “But how do you know this ‘maid friend’ of yours isn’t in on it, too? You said you barely knew this woman when you first spoke of her. How do you know this isn’t the same woman who came by my room after she left you?”

“Because,” Omar grumbled, “after she finished polishing my bedpost, she polished my bedpost. She was with me all night.”

The painter slumped again.

The lawyer did his big brother number. “Don’t worry. I said I was taking care of this, asshole—and I am.”

By the time they reached downtown, Michael had rebounded to give his friend a brief tour of Stonesthrow. The anti-dairy protesters from the previous day were still out in force when they pulled up at the coffeehouse, and the sight of them suggested another topic of discussion.

The philosopher huffed (never missing an opportunity to pontificate). “Moral sentiment reduced to absurdity is the worst form of decadence. It betrays an excess of leisure.”

Michael could not help himself. “But aren’t these ‘children of light’ attuned with your cosmic oneness of all things?”

The man was caught on it. “At one level, maybe. But Hitler killed six million Jews and made lampshades out of some of them. Was he a better man because he was a vegetarian?”

The driver turned off the ignition. “Don’t say anything.”

“I won’t,” the friend growled. “My only advice to you is: don’t stay too long in this college town!”

Omar could be intimidating, although it was as much for theatrical flourish as true conviction. It was not unlike him to argue with parked cars, taking exception to the simplistic political views often expressed on their bumper stickers. Once, on seeing a sticker that read, Hate is not a family value, he quipped, “And what conceivable value would drive a person to lower the resell value of their car by slapping an argumentative proclamation on the bumper…? Love…?” He refused to join any political party on principle, yet his thinking on the subject was not so much open-minded as ambivalent. Politics, as he saw it, was the high art of cherry picking “facts” to prejudice an argument, and without ever owning the underlying, oversimplifying prejudice. The folly of the venture was only compounded by the spurious proposition that all causes, conditions, and consequences could be known and corralled in advance of an outcome. Or, failing this, they could be known with prideful certainty after the fact and wielded as moral admonishments. Armchair quarterbacks routinely project solutions backward in time to remedy current problems, but never the unknown and unwanted consequences that any such solution would necessarily entail. In the lawyer's estimation, this constituted a free out: a consequence-free solution that eliminates another problem where the consequences are known. Omar once wrote his friend, “The Devil doesn’t dwell in the details, but in hindsight.” He dismissed conservatives and liberals, equally. Depending on the occasional flipping of polarities (as history has want to do), one was too loathed to accept change and the other was too loathed to accept the more things change the more they stay the same. (If nothing else, the man was irritatingly consistent.)

The two friends stepped onto the curb and around the protesters, although the painter could not help egging on his easily agitated friend once they were out of earshot. “You’re not overly impressed with college towns, are you?”

Omar was glum for effect. “The Greeks went to the Academy to become philosophers. But they were a little more selective back then. ‘Universal education’, of course, is the triumph of our liberal democracy. Never have so many known so much about so little.”

“I take that as a yes?”

The friend expounded, “At best, colleges are trade schools that get made-over with idyllic ivy. Like five hundred dollar shoes on a streetwalker.”

“At worst?”

Omar puffed out his chest in his typical fashion. “At worst, they’re either seminary schools for P.C. thumpers, or drunk tanks where better-off families can park their debauched spawn so they can destroy someone else’s private property until they’re old enough to covet their own.”

Michael laughed. “Didn’t you once tell me you would never trust anyone over thirty?”

The lawyer was affronted. “I still don’t trust anyone over thirty. Just because my opinion of youth has lessen with age doesn’t mean my attitude towards people over thirty has inversely improved.”

On this note, the two proceeded into the coffeehouse.